One Good Knight (34 page)

They all turned to look at her, dumbfounded. Except for Adamant, who looked desperate and gratified. “You would?” he cried. “You really would?”

“Well, why not?” she asked. “I already spend most of my time in armor anyway. Besides, I, uh—” She looked at Adamant and blushed. “We—uh—make a good—uh—team, Adam and I. I should think dragons would make good Champions.”

She shuffled her feet and looked down at them, flushing crimson. “He's a real charmer. I—uh—can understand why Andie is so in love with his brother. 'Cause—I never met anyone—I wanted to spend the rest of my life with—before I met Adam.”

“Really?” The heat coming off Adamant proved he was performing the draconic equivalent of blushing and was doing so just as hard. “Gina—you're—you'd—I'd—” The big, confident dragon was gone and in his place was—

Well, he looked and sounded for all the world like a lovelorn adolescent. In a tiny voice he said, “I think I love you, too. If love is never wanting to be away from you. Ever. For as long as I live.”

The stunned silence that settled over the courtyard was finally broken by laughter.

“Oh my!” Elena chortled, looking from one to
another of them as if she could not quite believe her luck. “Well, that would certainly give us all the happy-ending Traditional force I would need!”

“You would?” asked Adamant.

“You could?” asked Andie.

The Godmother rubbed her hands together and looked absolutely gleeful. “This is the sort of spell that you only get to cast once in a lifetime. No self-respecting Godmother would ever miss the chance to enter the Books of the Tradition with that kind of magic to her credit.” She rolled up her sleeves and took the wand from her belt.

She waved it once in the air—and suddenly everything in the courtyard glowed with a pure white light. Even the air itself suddenly seemed to be full of a glowing mist. The Godmother nodded happily. “All right, I would like Peri and Gina to stand right—” she moved around the courtyard until she could get the right spot “—here, I think.”

She began cutting glyphs in the air with her wand. The signs glowed, and she filled the air with them, working her way around and around the dragon and the human, until she had formed a kind of wall of glyphs that it was impossible to see through.

There was a sort of musical hum in the air, as if what she was doing was attracting yet more power. Finally she stopped, and held up the wand.

The circle of glyphs shrank around Peri and Gina, growing brighter by the moment. It collapsed in on them, until they were enclosed in a shining ball of light that began to rise from the courtyard until it hung about roof-height in midair.

Then it split into two glowing spheres, one amber-colored and one green. The spheres began to spin, and then to circle each other as if they were connected on a common axis. Faster and faster they spun, growing brighter and harder to look at, the two colors blurring together.

Until once again they formed a single sphere of white light.

Slowly the sphere drifted back down to the stones of the courtyard. And the light began to fade.

And at last, where there had been a dusky green dragon and an armored human—there was now, an armored human and a dusky green dragon.

Andie stared, and began to feel tears of disappointment well up. It hadn't worked. It hadn't worked after all—

The dragon held up a forefoot and examined the talons.

“First things first,” the dragon said in Gina's voice. “I have
got
to get these sharpened.”

And the human pulled off the helm to reveal a very masculine face with a slightly woebegone expression. “It would be nice,” said Periapt, “if someone would help me out of this armor. It seems to be rather too tight in a couple of very uncomfortable places.”

This would probably go down in the annals of the Godmothers of the Five Hundred Kingdoms as the oddest double wedding of all time.

It had to be held outdoors, and not just because one of the couples was a pair of dragons, but because at least thirty more dragons
and
a goodly number of large representatives from the Wyrding Others insisted on attending.

The ceremony itself was a bit odd, as well, since it was conducted not by any religious authority, but by a Godmother. Some were scandalized by this, but most folk seemed to take it in stride. After all, it wasn't every day that the first pair of Dragon Champions
ever
also got married.

In fact, they so eclipsed the human couple that a
great many people even forgot that it was supposed to
be
a double wedding.

That suited the human couple in question perfectly. Queen Andromeda still wasn't used to being in the public eye for most of her waking hours. And as for her new husband, Loremaster Periapt, the Prince-Consort was always happier in a library keeping quietly out of the way. Though, his researches had already begun to benefit the people of Acadia. He had opened negotiations with the Wyrding Others to allow selected harvesting of trees from their forest—the great giants were known to fall from time to time, and all were agreed that there was no point in allowing the wood to rot. And there were other stands that needed to be thinned. With the Dryads directing the thinning, the forest would rejoice in a healthy renewal, and the timber would find any number of homes. Peri had more such schemes in mind—

—but not today.

He and Andie waited on the walls for the dragons to depart. It was, after all, rather difficult to keep them fed in the city, and everyone tacitly agreed that the sooner they could move on and feed themselves with hunting, the better.

Finally, the two appeared on the Watch-Cliff above the Palace. As one, they dove from the cliff, side by side, opening their wings with a
snap
at the last minute and shooting over Andie's and Peri's heads. As the royal couple waved excitedly like a couple of children, the dragons waggled their wings in farewell, and
shot up and over the mountains, heading first for the Chapter-House of Glass Mountain and then—

Well, if they had a destination, they hadn't told anybody. Not even Godmother Elena.

“Where do you think they'll honeymoon?” Andie asked Peri as the two dragons flew off together.

“Hmm,” Periapt said, and raised an eyebrow. “Well, no matter what, I know one thing it will be.”

“Which is?” Andie asked him, as he put his arm around her waist and held her close.

He laughed. “Someplace—fireproof!”